This meant trade to other countries went down bringing the economy to yet another low and this lack of agricultural workers meant a lack of food across Russia, especially in towns and cities where there was no easy access to farms; and as is with most things in demand, the prices went through the roof, leaving peasants starving on a mass scale. The only short term fix that was established for this whole issue, was a series of loans from Russia’s allies, Britain and France; these loans are especially important when it comes to the provisional government’s role in the second revolution in 1917. The other major issue that was gained from the World War is the amazing show of incompetence from Russian military leaders, most notably Nicholas II. This led to a decreasing
The lack of usable land in Russia and the subdivison of land between families both resulted in an incredibly low income, especially for larger families. This combined with the illiteracy of the people and refusal of the Tsar to provide basic education meant that there was no way to escape the misfortunes of life as a peasant. The poor harvests of 1900 and 1902 worsened matters even further and fuelled the peasants anger. The famines and starvation that followed provided sufficient evidence that the Tsar was not a born leader, “gifted and sent from God” as they had been taught to believe, but a weak and incompetent leader, incapable of making decisions or change. Another issue was that whilst the Tsar encouraged the industrial growth of Russia, and was keen for the country to become an industrial power, when peasants then left the land to work in the developing enterprises, they discovered that their living conditions did not improve.
Women were another vulnerable group because they were always paid at a lower rate than men. There was no safety net for people who fell into poverty other than resorting to the ‘workhouse’ which had been established to deal with cases of extreme poverty in Trade unions had little power as the Taff Vale Incident of 1901 showed and Friendly Societies could only provide a limited amount of help. Attitudes to poverty in the early 20th century were quite unsympathetic many politicians from both the Liberal and Conservative party felt that poverty came from personal laziness. Both parties had an attitude of “laissez-faire” i.e. non interference from the government.
Though collectivisation may have had short term boosts to the economy but the effects of collectivisation were disastrous. For that the harvest of 1933 was nine million tons less than that of 1926 and the number of pigs dropped by 65%. These are the results of the peasants rebelling against the soviets forced collectivization. These peasant rebellions were damaging to the economy as its effects emanates to the city
Having a war caused inflation, government spending rose from 4-30 million, taxation increased, and money became practically worthless and the price of food and fuel quadrupled. This made people angry as they could not afford supplies for themselves and their families, which made them, turn to the Tsar for help but he wasn’t seen to be doing much about the effects of war on the people at home. Furthermore, as well as not being able to
As it was them who started the protest which turned into a revolution and also they were the ones behind the mutiny of the troops. However, the military was having many problems such as the war was going horribly wrong with many casualties, poor commanding from officers and limited military resources and equipment. The peasants were doing the fighting and the dying. So this could be a small contributing factor to the fall of the Romanov's on several different reasons. Firstly the tsar did not help the peasants personally, but instead leave the burden to the prime ministers when they cannot rule like a democracy today.
As the workers’ wages outpaced the prices of goods, the workers began to become rich and skilled in what they did. The only people who had servants to attend to them were the ones who could afford the terribly high salaries the servants demanded. Neighbors stole lead off of their dead neighbors’ roofs, stole pots and pans from their kitchens, and many times stole the clothes off their backs to sell to others. The need for money was extreme. Before the plague, Europe was beginning to struggle economically.
This meant serfdom was already coming to its own natural end, and for Alexander II to support his nobles he had to emancipate the serfs so they could go start increasing their wealth and get out of debt. Serfdom was also holding Russia back, with the rest of Europe liberalising and making vast economic progress Russia’s economy was starting to look inferior and for them to advance as a nation they had to increase productivity of the serfs and the simple solution was to emancipate them. The serfs were inefficient and had a low productivity due to poor farming methods and constantly being oppressed by their nobles. This oppression and poor farming was caused by the extremely conservative rule which refused to modernise, had the Tsar modernised the farming techniques and stopped the
Evidently, an innumerous amount of people suffered from the collectivization, therefore Stalin failed in the social policy of collectivization. Economically, collectivization was also a disaster. The grain harvest dropped dramatically in the early 1930s, the lost of animal population did not recover until after the Second World War. However, although the overall grain harvest declined in the early 1930s, state procurements
For however strong the system is at controlling the largely uneducated majority, Tsarism is only as powerful as the Tsar is at the time. So Tsarism in the 1900’s was not very powerful because we can see that from his actions Nicholas II was inept as a leader of such a large country. Blatant failures by the Tsar were apparent to the people of Russia; two examples, which cast questions over his ability, were the Famine of 1891 and the Russo-Japanese war. The famine was an extremely bad time to be a Russian citizen, a great majority of the country was starving and the Tsar and his government had no plan or solution to help the needy. A peasant needs nothing but a home and food, but when food is taken out of his life then he will ask questions